Graduate school part 3

So, you have made the decision to attend grad school for art. You have three interviews set up. What should you ask about? Funding is always a good one. How is the school going to invest in you as a student? Being in graduate school is already hard enough with the work load being double what your senior year was. Having to figure out how to pay for it opens up another whole dilema. If an institution tells you that you can apply for financial aid, this should be the first time that the school is set to support you as a graduate student. private funding through scholarship money is important in your success as a graduate student. If the institution has none or very little then thank them and be your way. Living quarters that are appropriate for advanced students should be available. If you have to go and find housing in the community then take this into consideration when it comes to negotiating your graduate school attendance. Real world experience in the school or through the school is very important. If you have no opportunity to build real world experience, again, say thank you and move on. A place that you just make art and take a couple of classes is not an adequate learning enviornment. After all an MFA is a professional degree and the program should be treating it as such.

The last part of this whole endeavor is this, when you go to college you are paying to be part of a group of people, hopefully professionals. Given this, the alumni association is extremely important for you to network through when you get out of school. These are people who share your educational experience and hopefully are building upon this in the real world. Ask how active their alumni association is. Ask how many alumni stay in the area or relocate to the nearest big city. Ask who are some of the most sucessful alumni so you can get an idea of how solid the education you are about to pay for really is. Also, check out the alumni association on your own. Sometimes professors are not glued in to the institution's own performance in this area, so be a student and do your homework.

A final note on graduate school, like many things in life, this is a negotiation. They have something you want, the ability to legitimize what you do on your own. You have something they want, money and dedication to the pursuit of being an artist. The reason I am telling you this is because most people think of college in this way, you apply, you pay, you work hard, you get your degree and you go out into the world. But graduate school is much different. Especially for fine art. You apply to many places. You get interviews at a couple. Everywhere is going to ask you where else you applied to and if you have interviews there. They do this to gauge their competition for your attendance to their program. This plays out in your favor if you play things right. A fellow graduate school attendie of mine had interviews at Yale and Boston MFA. When he came to the institution we attended, he used their wanting him as leverage to gain larger scholarship money. He won that bet and got double what everyone else got. Part of the situation is that graduate programs select students which will make their programs more attractive to new graduate students in the coming years. They want you because you lend a degree a newness to the institution no matter how good the faculty are. Yale being a prime example of this. Don't be a jerk in your negotiation but know that you do have this ability if you so choose to use it.

Good luck in gradschool and I hope this helps give some food for thought.

graduate school part 2

So, part of the reality of pursuing a career is your potential to earn an income with the training that you receive from your education. Part of this consideration is the cost of the education in the first place. I was given this advice when I was applying to graduate school and thought it to be a little extreme but have found that it is true: if you are good enough to be there then you should be paid to be there. Compensation such as tuition waivers, comped housing scholarships and the likes. An MFA is thought to be a silver bullet to jobless Bohemian lifestyle, but for most it is the beginning and the cause of that lifestyle choice. When you get out of school the likely hood of walking into a tenured college professorship is slim to nil. Seriously. Maybe 1% get that reality. Most people work freelance, teach at multiple institutions, making about as much as heir friends who are bar tenders.

Artists don't like to talk about money but its all around you and the cost of your future starts with the price tag of your education.

When you get into graduate school, there is one skill that will help you more than anything, networking.

I will pick up on this later. Good luck if you decide this is the way to go.

graduate school part 1

So in today's art world going to graduate school almost seems necessary. Some how the credentials of MFA on the. Resume mean so much along with the school they are put in front of. When you are attending your undergraduate institution all the professors talk about "when I was in graduate school", as if it changes everything about whom you would be without it. In some respects this is true. Here are some words of wisdom for those who might be reading this and heading off to graduate school for an MFA in visual arts. Your graduate institution means a lot!! Columbia and Yale might be expensive but their networks are super strong and push their graduates out into the field of both higher education and the gallery world with great sucess. So the institution you attend matters. If you do not attend one of these more prestigious institutions then you had best have your graduate educating being paid for by someone else, the school through scholarships and tuition waivers, private scholarships or government grants for education. If you have to pay to go to grad school, you a) probably shouldn't be there or b) are attending an institution which is in such dire straits for money that they can't afford to comp you for graduate education, which is just not right. Other graduate programs give their graduate students financial assistance and paths to a career in the field so why shouldn't your at school. If you do not have programs where you can build teaching experience or studio assistant experience then find a better school. More than likely these will be the jobs you will have to do when you get out because you are poor. So I will say this again, no opportunities to do these things, go somewhere else.

That is it for part one of this topic. I shall continue this soon with a picking up on this topic.

Enjoy the read people.

the return

So I had stepped away from this for a while because of work related concerns as many people have now a days but I have just decided to come back and awaken this blog with some new avenues for it as well as a first review.

I work freelance in a couple of museums around New York City. Those institutions shall remain nameless here but what I am going to start talking about is the reality of being an artist in nyc. For as great as this city is, you have to love the roller coaster here in order to possibly see your dream come true. For me that dream was to teach here and show here. A serious goal but I am not out to conquer the art world. So far, this dream is far off track. I came out to ny for graduate school and was kicked out of my MFA program three quarters of the way through. Yes people actually get kicked out of art school. So I finished up my masters in arts in art history and started art handling because it was 2007 and the job market was just starting to tank.

Now I find myself struggling to see how to manifest any life line towards my dream. I break my back and other parts of my body installing other people's art and neglecting my own. So where does this leave me? Seeing that I need to just put it all out there and just see what happens.

So I hope you enjoy what is about to happen here. An unfiltered look at the art world and someone struggling in it.

the return

Arts Around the Country

I realize that I have been dormant for so long and part of that is a lot of work coming up over the last few months as far as museum installation gigs go, but this lag in activity is also due to a roadtrip I took. In many of the art magazines lately I have been seeing adevertisements for a place called Paducah,KY. Since I had some down time coming up and was going to Chicago I thought that I would road trip it with my girlfriend and see what Paducah is all about. Many small towns and some large cities, like Detroit, have been turning their broken down neighborhoods over to artists in order to revitalize these areas and give the local economy a shot in the arm. Well, after a little tour around Paducah and talking to people who came down under such an idea as cheap homes & land, I have basically found this out. The game plan works much like this: the towns offer the land and buisness spaces to artists for cheap (yeah, its about time), in turn the artists have to come armed with checks and bank standings close to $500,000.00 in liquid assets, along with a buisness plan for the local community that is traditional and not necessarily arts related. After talking to one shop owner, I came to find out that many of the first people to undertake this to set up galleries had to shut up shop. As to why these people shut up shop and left, that was not really clarrified but one can only imagine that a serious lack of support from the community probably was a big help to that.

In my own walking around the area, I could not see much support for the arts other than the performing arts. The visual arts in the area seemed to be second if not third fiddell to commerce. The most upsetting thing is that when we walked around the town to check out the "gallery" spaces it turns out that the display spaces for the art was over tables in resturaunts, behind the counter at a chocolate shoppe, and in back rooms of a convenience store.

This is a point that many of us in the art world are completely aware of, that in the view of the public we are just picture makers, that what we do is just decorate the living room, but as artists we make the investment in excavating the soul for meaning for years, moving to urban centers which are far from families and friends. When we attend higher education for years, sometimes as many as a decade learning the history of visual culture, learning how to read and interpret images and learning how to push our own visual culture forward, we are left still to the mis-conception that we are decore makers. This is not the case. Ever. So, cities and towns like Paducah and Detroit, before you decide to make an offer to basically give land to artists in exchange for us to revitalize your shattered images, ask yourself what you are giving us to help you out. A little advertising in a couple of magazines is not enough and if you can't figure it out, then hire someone who knows what is happening in the arts and can get the ideas right.

Guard Talk

I want to say thank you to Whitney Gardener, creator of HeyWhitney@blogspot.com , for brainstorming with me and helping me come up with this idea for the blog.

While at the Met for the closing weekend of the Francis Bacon show we were able to start this out. "Guard Talk" is a section of the blog that is going to be dedicated to the people who have to live with the work day in and day out in the institutions, the guards. Those people who tell you to step back and that there are no photos in the museum finally are going to freely voice their opinions. Which is great because there are a lot of guards in this town who are artists to begin with. Some famous artists started out as museum guards, like Brice Marden who used to guard at the Jewish Museum. He said he learned so much from looking at a show of Jasper Johns' work in the 60's. Without that time to just sit and look at the art who knows what he would have done.

"Guard Talk" presents: Met Museum guard Carl and his opinion of the Francis Bacon show as well as a candid point of view about another favorite spot for him to guard. He had this to say, and I am paraphrasing, that the "Bacon show is a great and fun exhibition but dark and disturbing at the same time. There is probably no better time for this show to be up." As for Carl's most favorite place to guard at the Met, it is the roof garden. The current sculpture installation is a work by the artist Roxy Paine. You can see an installation video on the Met's YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/metmuseum). Carl said that he likes it up there because of the view and fresh air but he had to, on opening night, tell people who had a little too much to drink not to do chin ups on the sculpture. Lesson one for all sculptors: make sure that your work can with stand a lawyer in tux on his third martini trying to impress his date by showing her/him how strong they are. Thanks Carl for the great story.